July 10, 2011-Shooting an Eclipse of the Moon

wingssail images-fredrick roswold
Eclipse of the Moon

In June Judy and I heard about the upcoming eclipse of the moon and we decided to watch it from Wings' deck.

I've pointed my camera at the moon plenty of times but the shots never came out. I never understood why a beautiful moon looks so crummy in my photos.

With this eclipse I had another chance; we had clear weather and a good view of the sky and I decided to solve the problem.

Prior to the start of the eclipse I went on deck and took some shots with guessed exposures and then came below to look at them on the computer. As usual they were bad; overexposed and washed out. I dropped the exposure a little and tried it again. Better but still crummy. So I chopped the exposure way way down and bracketed a bunch.

That's when they started to work. It seems that you don't need much light to get a good moon shot.

Once I had it worked out then I shot these series about 10-20 mins apart and did the composite in Photoshop.

I'm happy with my moon shots of the eclipse.

The settings, for any shutter bugs out there: 200mm, 1/1250sec, f6.3, ISO Speed Rating 400

Fred & Judy, SV Wings, Richards Bay, SA